Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Kane scowled as though annoyed by one too many questions. “Must I tell you everything?”

  “God, no!” Fulton shouted looking at the school bus where the children he’d seen earlier were now sitting, obviously crying.

  The first woman shouted something else toward the men standing with the children. Apparently, one of the men there understood her and didn’t need a translator. Immediately, there were several bursts of automatic rifle fire, which echoed across the fields. An eerie silence followed, which was broken by the cawing of crows and, after a moment, a bellow of rage from Fulton.

  “God damn you, you murdering son of a bitch,” he yelled. He tried to rise to his feet to go after Kane but was clubbed back to the ground by the two guards. Dazed, he rolled over onto his back. “Better finish it,” he swore at Kane. “Or someday I’m going to kill you, you insane piece of crap.”

  Kane put a finger to his lips. “Oooooh. Down ‘Shaft.’ Always playing the hero, but it didn’t do those children who were kind enough to participate in my little ruse any good, now did it? Or save any of these fine police officers and marshals? Guess being a hero didn’t mean shit today.”

  Waving Agent Grover’s gun at the detective, Kane said, “You know, I really should shoot you now. Isn’t it always the way in movies: the bad guy doesn’t kill the good guy when he has the chance and lives only long enough to regret it?”

  Without warning, Kane rushed at Fulton and kicked him hard in the ribs, knocking the wind out of the detective. He kicked him again and again like he was punting a football. “You going to kill me, Detective?” he raged. “You think a piece of shit nigger is going to kill Andrew Kane?” He rained more blows.

  Finally, Kane tired and stopped. Panting from his exertions, he said, “However, no, Detective Fulton. As much as I would like to stomp you to death like a cockroach, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet. I want you to have to live with this fine job you did weighing on your conscience for a while, maybe you’ll decide to suck on the end of your gun and blow your ugly head off because all those kids were counting on you to deliver crazy Mr. Kane to the hospital safe and sound. But first, I need you to take a message back to our mutual friend Mr. Karp.”

  “Fuck you,” Fulton croaked, spitting blood out on the snow. “I ain’t your messenger boy.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll do as told,” Kane said, kicking Fulton again. “After all, ol’ Butchie is going to want to know everything that happened here today. So tell him I said, ‘The game is on.’ And that I hope he’s up to the challenge. I don’t want this to be too easy when I kill every thing he loves—his bitch, his idiot kids, his imbecile friends, and even his fucking dog—before I come for him.”

  A black helicopter appeared from over the top of the trees and landed on the highway behind the last burning car. “Ah, my ride awaits,” Kane said. “Samira, my love, would you do the honors.”

  Fulton looked back and saw that the first woman had a handgun pointed at his leg. She pulled the trigger and the bullet tore into his knee. He screamed in rage and pain, and then screamed louder as a second bullet blew his other knee apart.

  “Just a little something to remember me by,” Kane said. “I think your chasing days are done, don’t you?” He giggled and took off at a trot for the helicopter with Samira and the other female terrorist on his heels.

  As the helicopter took off, Fulton lay in the snow wishing that Kane had killed him. Then he thought of Helen and his children and slowly, painfully, began dragging himself through the snow toward the overturned school bus.

  1

  March

  THE GNOME-LIKE ITALIAN GRANDMOTHER DROPPED HER OVERSIZED purse in the crosswalk as she tried to jostle her way through the crowd at the corner of Canal and Centre streets in Lower Manhattan. A short, bandy-legged fellow with big ears stooped to pick it up but was nearly knocked over when she pushed him away and ripped the bag out of his grasp.

  “Watch it, minchione,” the old crone hissed.

  Having essentially just been labeled a “fucking idiot,” Ray Guma backed off as his octogenarian assailant fixed him with what he assumed to be her version of malocchio, the “evil eye,” while she scuttled back to the curb.

  “I’ll call the cops,” she shouted at him and gave him il ditto medio.

  You got to love us Eye-ties, Guma thought, we’re such an expressive people. He hurried across the street and reached the curb where he turned right and headed south toward his destination, the Criminal Courts building at 100 Centre Street.

  A storm had blown in Friday, dumping two feet of snow on the city, which by Monday morning was melting slush piles along the curbs and inescapable puddles on the sidewalks. Although the temperature had risen to fifty degrees, the skies were overcast with the weatherman hedging his bets—“a fifty percent chance”—on whether more snow was on the way. But even wets socks and irascible old women couldn’t dampen Guma’s mood as he approached the courthouse.

  From a distance the building, with its four front towers and the jail behind it, looked massive, reminding him of an enormous gray toad towering seventeen stories above the streets and gobbling up the insect-sized humans who passed between the stone pillars at its mouth. The limestone and granite exterior was not welcoming to most, and many of those who went inside had reason to fear they would not be coming out—at least not for a while. But Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma never failed to appreciate the building as the scene of some of his greatest triumphs in life, or to reflect on the irony of the location, a trait that might have surprised those of his colleagues who thought he was not the contemplative sort.

  The site on which it stood had once been known as Collect Pond, a large lake at the southern end of Manhattan that had teemed with fish and wildlife, first a favorite of the Indians, and then of picnickers and fishermen. But eventually the tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries moved in and polluted the water until it was little more than a cesspool and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease.

  In 1802, the city had drained the lake and surrounding swamp to make room for houses, and for a brief few years, the area enjoyed a reputation as a respectable, if modest, neighborhood called Five Points for the convergence of streets that met there. But the homes had fallen into disrepair, and the upwardly mobile members of the neighborhood left for greener pasture uptown.

  Through most of the nineteenth century, Five Points was a notorious hellhole of rotting tenement houses—occupied by the latest wave of impoverished immigrants and “free Negroes,” as well as brothels and saloons. There, the law-abiding residents had been extorted, shanghaied, murdered, and terrorized by gangs and corrupt politicians until the victims, too, could flee or turn from prey to predator.

  “This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here bear the same fruit here as elsewhere,” Guma recited quietly as he wove through the crowd toward the building with his eyes on the deliciously round ass of the woman walking in front of him—a favorite pastime.

  The quote was from a passage that Charles Dickens had written about Five Points in American Notes after visiting the area escorted by two police officers. Guma’s fifth-grade teacher had insisted that her class of Italian, Irish, German, African, Puerto Rican, and other children of immigrants memorize parts of it as being integral to their personal histories. He was surprised that more than four decades later he could remember even that much of it.

  “Where dogs would howl to lie, men and women and boys slink off to sleep,” said a voice at his side, “forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”

  Guma stopped and looked over at a dirt-encrusted, bug-eyed bald man who also stopped and stood grinning at him—whether from mirth or insanity, Guma could not tell. With a gaping hole where his teeth had once been and the disintegrating potpourri of indistinct clothing he wore, the man looked like he also could very well have been the moronic great-grandchild of
some unfortunate genetic mix from the old Five Points denizens. “All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here,” the stranger said and giggled.

  Normally, Guma would have merely smiled and nodded to a man who’d done him no more harm than help recall an old passage from a story. You could not live most of your life around the streets of New York, especially working for the DAO, without developing a certain tolerance, even fondness, for the diversity of its huddled masses. But the man’s protruding yellow-green eyes and the idiot grin made Guma uncomfortable. “You know your Dickens,” Guma said, intending to pass by.

  The man jumped back. Giving Guma a wide berth—to the point of rudely pushing other pedestrians out of his way—the madman circled around until he was safely behind, then ran off down the sidewalk, shouting as if he were being chased. “He knows Dickens! He knows Dickens! Beware! Beware!”

  Guma shook his head as he watched the man disappear in the bobbing mass of heads. Then he noticed the suspicious glances from fellow New Yorkers and cautious stares of visitors, all trying to assess if he was part of the insanity. He supposed that dressed in comfortable but old sweat clothes and ratty Nikes—part of his on-again, off-again regime to “get back in shape”—and sporting a two-day growth of beard—part of his plan to shave as little as possible—he might have missed the “maturing but still virile” look he’d aimed for and achieved “eccentric old bum” instead. He decided to ignore the looks and hurry on.

  Approaching the stairs leading to the building’s maw, Guma looked up and paused appreciatively. It was almost the twentieth century before the city fathers got up the nerve to raze the squalor that was Five Points and, in a sort of civic slap to the face of the evil done there in the past, built a courthouse across Franklin Street from the old Tombs prison. The Tombs got its name because the locals thought it looked like an Egyptian mausoleum; it was considered one of the worst prisons in the country for most of the century. Small wonder that the catwalk connecting the courthouse and prison over which prisoners passed was called the Bridge of Sighs.

  Guma knew the history by heart and took pride in being able to recall its details. The city jail had been rebuilt several times and was now officially the Manhattan Detention Center, though it had retained its nickname through each of its incarnations. And it was still connected to the Criminal Courts building by an underground tunnel through which thousands of prisoners still sighed on their way to see the judge or return to their cells.

  In 1941, the old criminal courts building also had been replaced with the current one. It housed the city’s Criminal and Supreme courts, Legal Aid, offices for the NYPD, the Department of Correction, the Department of Probation, and, on the eighth floor the Office of the District Attorney of New York County.

  Climbing the stairs to the entrance, Guma began to labor. Once upon a time, before the cancer, he’d entered the building like he owned the place—a young, macho assistant district attorney with the New York DAO. Back then he’d been known as “the Italian Stallion”…feared by bad men, revered by women both good and bad…. At least that was his story and he’d stuck to it for the better part of thirty or so years.

  “More like the ‘Sicilian Shetland Pony’ these days,” he grumbled as he arrived at the top of the stairs winded from the minor exertion. Maybe it’s metastasized to your lungs. He quickly shook off the dark thought. That’s thinking like a loser. You a loser, Guma?

  The cancer had started as a constant ache in his gut; then there was blood in his urine, and finally a sharper pain that wouldn’t subside no matter how much whiskey he drank or pain pills he swallowed. He’d overcome a standing distaste for doctors, which returned when one told him that he had cancer. A very bad, aggressive cancer that would kill him soon if he didn’t take drastic measures, the man said. Those measures had included removing a few yards of his guts, followed by miserable bouts of chemotherapy that made him wish he were dead.

  However, he’d survived what might have killed a less strong-willed individual, but it had also made an old man out of him. Sometimes the change was only outward. His once wavy black hair had turned white almost overnight, and the thickly muscled baseball player’s body had wasted into sagging skin and aching bones. On cool, wet days like this one, he could feel where he’d been laid open, his diseased parts removed, and then sewn back together.

  Most of the time, he still thought like the Ray Guma of old—cocky, headstrong, and convinced that he was God’s gift to women. His mind was still as agile as ever, the biting wit razor sharp, even if he didn’t have as much energy for lengthy debate or even screwing as he had back in the day.

  Yet, some days he had a hard time shaking the feeling that he was just biding his time until “the really bad news.” In fact, sometimes he felt like he was walking around inside the outer shell of a man he might have once been, but that man had taken a horrible beating and been left a frightened victim of a crime he couldn’t prevent. It surprised him. He’d always thought he would be the sort to scoff in the face of death, but it wasn’t the case. There were days when he was sure the pain in his abdomen was more than scar tissue tearing, or the shortness of breath a warning that the cancer had moved north.

  Then at night, he’d lie alone in his bed, trying to tune in to what his body was telling him. But all he could hear would be his heart beating through the mattress: Doom-doom. Doom-doom. Doom-doom. On nights like that, he’d get up, dress, and go try to walk off the anxiety attacks that threatened to overwhelm him when surrounded by four walls.

  The feeling never lasted, usually not even on those nights. The morning light would find him calm and contemplative, sitting on some park bench with the sun on his smiling face like some Italian Buddha, happily listening to the city launch into day mode. Then the pugnacious, womanizing street kid would reemerge ready to fight or make love, whichever came first…bad guys and good women beware.

  Guma entered the Criminal Courts building and looked up at the big clock that hung down from the exact center of the two-story lobby. It was another impact of the disease that he rarely wore a watch anymore; he didn’t need anything telling him how much time was left in the day.

  On time, he thought as he headed to the elevator to take him up to the eighth floor. He was thankful to have work. The cancer treatments had forced him to take a leave of absence, and he still didn’t have the energy for a full-time caseload. But Karp let him do what he could.

  Of late, a period covering the past several months, he’d taken an interest in so-called cold cases—homicides that had gone unsolved and been shelved to await further development. The files—literally thousands of them—were kept in a corner of the basement. With the help of one of the old, retired NYPD detectives hired by Karp to work on special investigations, a tough old-school cop named Clarke Fairbrother, he’d started looking through the files for one that might have some hope of resolution.

  It wasn’t a case of chasing ghosts. With improvements in forensic investigation tools, like national databases for DNA and fingerprints, cases formerly thought to be unsolvable were being brought to justice more and more frequently. And some just needed a fresh set of eyes.

  He’d found several cases that held promise. But the excitement he was feeling at the moment had been initiated not by his investigations, but a telephone call. As he stepped off the elevator, his mind flashed to the photograph of the victim, Teresa Stavros, a beautiful woman when she’d disappeared some fifteen years earlier and whose face had worked its way into his dreams.

  Entering the outer office, he was met immediately with the disapproving glance of his boss’s receptionist. “Hello, Mrs. Milk-Toast,” he said cheerily.

  Mrs. Milquetost glared at him. They’d been having this battle over the pronunciation of her name ever since she started working several months earlier.

  “There are three syllables in my name, Mr. Guma—Mil-Kay-Tossed…it’s French, Mr. Guma…Mrs. Mil-Kay-Tossed,” she lectured. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d be so kind
as to remember that in the future.”

  Guma smiled and said, “Sorry, I was just yanking your chain, Darla. I promise to do better in the future. Is the boss in?”

  Just then Butch Karp opened the door and stuck his head out. “Mr. Guma, if you’d be so kind as to join me in my office,” he said.

  2

  “WOULD YOU MIND NOT ANTAGONIZING MY RECEPTIONIST,” Karp said after he shut the door. “Mrs. Milquetost may be a bit eccentric, but she is efficient, minds her own business, and, unlike my last receptionist, doesn’t seem to be spying on me for Andrew Kane.”

  “Sorry. Can’t help it,” Guma laughed. “She reminds me of my fifth-grade teacher, Sue Queen. A real tyrant. But I’ll try.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Karp replied. Then his eyebrow arched, he grinned wickedly, and added, “There isn’t something going on between you and Mrs. M, is there?”

  Guma looked horrified. “What in the hell do you mean by that?” he demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You say she reminds you of your fifth-grade teacher, but this reminds me more of a twelve-year-old boy yanking on the ponytail of a girl he likes—”

  “Christ on a crutch, give me a break. Are ya blind?” Guma exclaimed. “She must be a hundred years old—”

  “I looked at her résumé, she’s two years younger than you. A widow, too.”

  “There’s chronological age and there’s psychological age,” Guma sniffed. “I date women who look closer to my psychological age.”

  “Yeah, but teenagers under the age of sixteen are off limits in the state of New York,” Karp said, circling around to his seat on which he plopped down with a self-satisfied smirk. “Nevertheless, I’ll thank you kindly if you’d avoid boinking Mrs. Milquetost should you ever find her drunk at an office party and in a compromised position. Office romances are such a pain in the ass.”

  “Screw you, Karp,” Guma said, smiling as he sat in the leather chair by the bookcase, across the room from his boss’s desk. He’d never been one who liked sitting in a chair across a desk from someone else; it made him feel subservient. He glanced at the small stand with a green-shaded reading lamp next to the chair and reached for a small black object. “Black bishop,” he said. “Yours?”